>I think we as a community should encourage people to state their DNN version in their post

this is the ideal situation however I cannot see this being effective in the real world situation based on the current postings. Formalizing it would be the correct procedure to use and the easy way to do that is to use the modules already buit in function of multi forums.

Using the forum module on a client site we would pre set the forums by product and within each product by sub forum again - the module has the capability built in to do this. Would this make it harder to find information - I cannot for the life of me see why it would.  I really think this is more important now that we have dnn products over more then one platform

But then of course this is only my view.

 

The best approach would be:

1.  eliminate the issues that cause 50% of the daily posts...

2.  this would free up core team and the regular users to post more on actual issues...

3.  use a different forum module  ( the reason for not doing so was because the core team wanted to use it's own modules..  well that rule was thrown out with the store example)

I've read and digested every word of the posts in this thread previous to my post. Not to my surprise, this thread is filled with great insights -- and it starts to approach some even better ideas. I want to chime in with a few additional thoughts about how these forums fit into the larger scheme of all DNN activity.

First, I want to address how impacting DNN can be for a larger community. Eight months ago, I didn't know the first thing about the elements of an HTML file. I barely understood what a web server was, or what it does. Yet within three months of first hearing the word "DotNetNuke", I was able to go from absolute zero to creating a website that was covered and/or contacted by many major news organizations. (By way of demonstrating impact: the evening national news for all three major broadcasting corporations, Newsweek, MSNBC, The Nation, National Public Radio, and countless newspapers. 700,000 pages served in 3 months.)

All of this was possible because of a notion, and DNN. It is not perfect (yet), but it is fair to say that I am a believing DNN enthusiast.

Without the help of the people in these forums, it would not have happened. I would not have felt the confidence to start out as a noob and take the risk of creating a site which sort of required me to know what I was doing.

Nonetheless the vast majority of my "working to learn" and my "learning to make it work" occurred via the miracle of Google. For many of the finer details requiring assistance, I would need to blindly fire off emails to people who I do not know, and who I found via Google anyway. I would thus depend on their generosity to help me out. And you know something? They always did help. 100% of the time, out of nothing but human kindness on their part.

I think this is evidence of the spirit that underlay the DNN community. I've seen it only a few times on web communities, but it's magic when it happens. As evidenced in this thread, there is obviously a need for improvement of communication, but there exists the willingness to discuss how it might happen.

I concur with many observations previously posted. I gave up on the search function here long ago. It frustrates me that when I want to reply to a post, but am not logged in at that second, that I find myself after logging in on a page other than where I had clicked the 'Reply' button. But these are surmountable issues.

For me, the real issue is why we are all fighting the same dragon with such innumerable, small swords. You could take a survey of any 10-day period on these forums and get a concise list of questions/topics which correlate with 80% of the previous week's topics. Which in turn correlate with 80% of the queries posted in all previous weeks, etc.

These central themes should be melded into one mighty sword in the form of a wiki. It doesn't have to be a DNN-based wiki. Now I did a search tonight and it does seem that someone has started this idea over at dnnwiki. n e t

Let me give you some context for how powerful this can be. I was an early player in the submarine simulation Silent Hunter III. You think it's tricky demonstrating to someone how to backup their DNN site? How about if you are given the noble task of explaining trigonometry to a common joe? (So that he can triangulate a ship's location and possible course.) What about explaining to him the dynamics of early war torpedoes so that he can calculate whether he should go for an impact or magnetic detonation depending on wave structure and keel depth...

Well, pretty soon we in the forums for the sub game could see that we could assist people by the thousands with one good answer: a wiki. If the question was, for the umpteenth time today, "How do I know which spotted national flags are hostile to Germany on such-and-such date of the war?" ... then the answer was, "Hi Mike, welcome to our forums. I see you're a new poster. We've prepared a page with ships' flags and hostility dates over at the wiki, it's right on this page *here* (click)

I feel DNN should have the benefit of this resource. Sure, it takes a couple of months to get its mojo running. But eventually it cuts down massively on the number of unanswered posts. It takes over (and answers the questions of) the most common Google queries for tasks. The appropriately-developed wiki centralizes for the user -- and for those who are the "assistors" -- the job of keeping the community connected, helpful and enthused.

Thanks for reading. Travis